36
As Lansing watched the screen with the image of the Internet, a single yellow line came out of a node, and another, and suddenly yellow lines were proliferating everywhere, going every which way, nodes popping yellow like blooming flowers. This went on, in slow motion, for minutes. It was mesmerizing. The room was silent. The minutes stretched on, and on, as the image on the screen slowly began to change.
After a half hour, a white line appeared, and another. Nodes started blinking white.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re after her,” Moro murmured. “It’s working … She’s trying to shake the bots by going into superfast Internet waters. But she can’t escape them, because she’s big and slow and they’re small and fast.”
More excruciating movement, like slow, silent fireworks. Once again, it occurred to Lansing how extremely valuable Moro was and how he must do all in his power to retain the man’s loyalty and affection. He could never be replaced. When all was said and done, if this worked, he would consider making Moro a junior partner.
“Steady on,” murmured Moro, staring at the screen with wide eyes. “Steady on.”
White and yellow, white and yellow. More time passed in silence.
“She’s really on the run now,” he said. “They’re cornering her.”
Certain small parts of the net began blinking red.
“What’s the red?”
“Internet traffic slowdowns. As the bots close in, they clog the system. It’s good—slows her down, too.”
“Will she escape?”
“I don’t think so. It’s fifty million bots against one superbot.”
It was amazing, this chase. When Lansing had first gone into high-frequency trading, a half second was considered a fast trade. Now it was milliseconds. Soon high-frequency trading would be measured in microseconds. Lansing felt a rush of excitement thinking about the possibilities offered by this Dorothy program. He wished that the old man, his father, sitting gaga in a nursing home, had the brain cells left to see his son rule Wall Street.
But he was counting his chickens before they had hatched. There was a long road from here to there, with one corpse already lying by the wayside. It surprised him how successful that murder had been. Most killings, he thought, were done by stupid, disorganized people who got caught. All a successful killer had to do was be smarter than the police. How hard was that?
Moro jumped up from his chair with a whoop, smacking his hands together and pumping one fist in the air. “Come on, come on, they’re closing in!”
A large node in one corner of the map popped white. And now the activity began to intensify in just that section of the map, the white getting denser and denser until it became almost solid, with more and more of it flashing red.
“They’ve got her trapped, the bitch is cornered!”
More flickering white in one little corner. And then the map seemed to freeze.
Moro was staring at the screen. He slowly breathed out. “They got her,” he said quietly. “That’s it. Done. She’s deactivated.”
“Excellent! That’s all there was to it?”
“All we need now is to find the location of the dead Dorothy … that is, the hardware she’s in. That information will be coming through in a moment.”
A long moment of silence, while Moro kept staring. “Okay, okay,” he muttered. “Wherefore art thou, locator program…?”
A window popped open on the screen. It was the locator program, with a message. Some computer message that made no sense to Lansing.
But Moro understood it. “Son of a bitch!” he screamed, leaping up, his hair wild.
“What?”
“She got away!” He slammed his fist on the table. “Bitch left the Internet entirely. Jumped into some device and then disconnected it from the Internet.”
“Device? Like what?”
“It could be anything—a laptop, someone’s iPhone.”
“She could actually be in someone’s phone?”
“Any device with enough storage.”
A silence. Lansing said, “Can you physically locate the computer it jumped into?”
Moro stared at the screen, and began typing. The typing went on and on. Lansing felt sick. All this effort, all this expense, and they still were no closer to finding the people who had stolen his money.
“Okay … okay … I got an IP address. It’s a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-bit IPv6 address and…” He rapped on some keys. “The proxy can’t be detected, but the Whois is … Let’s see … Wait…”
Lansing waited while Moro continued to work feverishly on the computer. “This is good. The bitch tried to pass off a fake IP address on me. But she had that dog program with her, and I guess she forgot it also needed a fake IP. I got it just as she vanished.”
“Where is it?”
“Baynet Internet Services, Half Moon Bay, California. That’s the ISP the device was connected to. The real one, not the fake.”
“So where is it?”
“That’s as far as the IP address leads. To find the actual device, I’d need to get the customer info from Baynet. And then the router log at the address itself. That’s the only way I can know exactly what device it jumped into.”
Lansing stared at Moro. He looked disheveled, like he had just been in a fight. The older man suppressed his vast irritation. “Tell me, please, what we need to do to retrieve that program.”
“Well.” Moro scratched his unshaven face. “I might be able to hack into Baynet and retrieve the customer information.”
“And if you can’t?”
“We’ll have to go to California and somehow get the customer address from Baynet.”
“And then?”
“We go to the house, figure out which device it’s on, and take it. But we better do it fast, ’cause this device, whatever it is, may reconnect to the Internet at some point and Dorothy might just take off again. Just in case that happens, I’ll keep the botnet active. If she comes back into the Internet, even for a millisecond, those bots’ll be after her like the Furies. And I’ll know right away.”
“What’s Baynet’s address?”
More clicking of keys. “Four hundred ten Main Street, Half Moon Bay, owned by a guy named … William Echevarria. Lemme see if I can hack into his customer list from here.”
Lansing picked up the phone and dialed his Gulfstream charter firm. A moment later, he hung up. “Do it fast. We’re leaving in an hour.”